WA government taking more Aboriginal children

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children being removed from the care of their parents in Western Australia.

A report by the Department for Child Protection and Family Support has found that in the year from 30 June 2015 to 1 July 2015, of the 4,503 children that have been taken, 52 percent are from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds. This is despite them being just 6.7 percent of the state’s child population.

While the numbers of non-Indigenous children removed grew by 3 percent, the number of Indigenous children removed grew by 9 percent over the year – and by 56 percent since 2010.

But it’s not just Western Australia – 20 percent of children in out-of-home care nationally are Indigenous.

The latest figures come almost two decades after the Bringing them home report revealed that up to 50,000 children and their mothers had suffered, “the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation”.

The final chapters of Bringing them home warned that the policies of the then state and federal governments were creating the conditions for a new Stolen Generation. Two decades on, that warning has become a reality.